Category: Technology

Heart Rate

What amazed me during my studies were rest heart rates of cyclists and other athletes, e.g. Lance Armstrong – 32 bpm. After my bypass surgery they gave me a pacemaker when my heart dropped below fifty while I was deeply sleeping one night, and it only kicks in when my BPM goes too low.

I’ve been investigating maximum recommended heart rates since mine is “high” for the charts typically used to gauge such things, and I need to set some bounds when exercising and recuperating from my heart surgery. There’s really not a clear cut determination on what your beats per minute should be since there are too many factors besides just age at play. The max heart rate for my age is 165 by the most popular method, which is fallible (+ or – 20 BPM). (See Chart Below) By more recent method and studies it’s 168-170 and the latter is supposed to be accurate to within 6-8 BPM.

What amazed me during my studies were rest heart rates of cyclists and other athletes, e.g. Lance Armstrong – 32 bpm. After my bypass surgery they gave me a pacemaker when my heart dropped below fifty while I was deeply sleeping one night, and it only kicks in when my BPM goes too low.

Below is the standard chart, but remember this could be off by as much as 20 BPM either direction:

Frankenputer Chronicles III

In previous episodes you saw the genesis of Frankenputer, but in this one you find that he has died. That’s right, something is wrong with the server and it won’t even do a POST . That’s indicative of a power, memory, or bios/MB problem so … I swapped out the memory to eliminate one of those and I am now moving on to the power supply.

This seems reasonable to me since the PC has only a 400 watt supply, and I’m really going overkill on some of the peripherals. It’s got a GTX-260 GPU that takes two power leads, and I’m also driving two extra hard drives, a Wifi USB dongle, and a blue tooth USB dongle. [ Picture a wee Scottish engineer inside the Power Supply yelling “Cap’n! The power supply canna take it anymore! ]

I upgraded to a 600 watt PS, so all should be well after the replacement surgery is complete.

UPDATE: The power supply did not do it, so it’s something more serious, like BIOS or Motherboard. More to come…

The Frankenputer Media Server Chronicles II – What’s out there for Content?

The first gap is content delivery: the content available for streaming on the internet isn’t quite as rich in video quality or in diversity as that found in the average cable contract without a bit of work or adaptation.

Frankenputer Streaming Media Server part II – What’s out there for Content?

In a previous article I explained how I replaced my DVD player/recorder with a PC server to view my home media, stream it anywhere in the house wirelessly, and play / record DVD s with the PC. The other goal was to gain access on my HDTV’s to the wide variety of other streaming sources on the internet that you just don’t get from cable. So far it’s working out great but there are a few minor snags and gaps, which I’ll be covering in a series of posts as I work around them. My goals in doing this are below:

  • To eschew adding proprietary widgets, proprietary software, or special gadgets to view streaming TV
  • To use my media and to tie it all together. Open is the operative word.
  • To gain access to the richest spectrum of content without paying additional
  • To identify and explore the gaps in delivery of digital internet streaming content

Some of you are using your game consoles and/or other devices such as auxiliary boxes that connect to your television and the internet to stream, but those are somewhat limited. More on that in later articles on the technical setup and feature gaps and improvements needed, and I’ll also explain some of the benefits and drawbacks of streaming your own media through wireless.

The first gap is content delivery: the content available for streaming on the internet isn’t quite as rich in video quality or in diversity as that found in the average cable contract without a bit of work or adaptation. In a few short years pretty much everything will be streamed, and physical media sold over the counter will go the way of the dodo within two decades, but we really aren’t there quite yet.

Even though there are gaps in what is fully available, there are also things available on the internet that you just can’t get through cable. Indy content is working really hard to replace Big Content, and Big Content is in a variety of defensive modes from circling the wagons to exploring new paths in reaction to the large scale changes to come – the form they will take is uncertain but there are certainly going to be new media behemoths and applications coming.

Those video quality gaps exist in cable as well however. Cable is not full 1080p all shows all of the time and neither are the locations on the internet that stream. Cable sometimes stutters or “Pixelates”, so do the media streaming sites. All of that said, it’s not quite a full replacement for your cable DVR yet so let’s review the options for someone who has zero cable and a streaming internet media server. There’s also the ongoing war over Net Neutrality which is what most of the holdup in internet streaming is about. [ More on the full ramifications and foundational shakeup that this legal war between cable companies and FCC could represent at this Berkman panel discussion, which, since it’s at you tube I can stream to my TV upstairs, just as I could be editing this post upstairs on my big screen if I wished to. ]

The first thing you will encounter is lack of full HD at some internet streaming channels – except where you use a DVD; more on that in some of the capsule reviews below.

So what is out there now?

Non Premium Internet Media Outlets

Since the “Dinosaur” broadcast networks are operating on a model that makes advertising their main revenue stream, they are uniquely positioned to undergo a quantum leap in evolution and become the free flying “Avians” of internet streaming. If they can dig out of the tarpit of non compete clauses etc with their local affiliates things could get real interesting if all of the major players build or rent their own content delivery networks with streaming engines in all medium to major cities. Here’s a hint: it costs less to build out a content streaming network than to either build or maintain a Broadcast network. There’s even room for new Ted Turners in this space: if some local stations band together in a region they could leapfrog and also become major players, and even eventually cut ties with the majors.

CBS streams their prime time and some classic shows, their functionality is built right into Microsoft Media Center, and there’s even a section for them in the guide. At CBS you can watch classics like the complete 7 seasons of McGuyver, or you can watch all broadcast content such as Survivor and CSI as they run for free on demand. CBS also streams in “HQ / HD” for most shows, which really means “480P and 720P.”

Hulu has quite a lot of content that grows daily and they are the site of choice for the broadcast and cable networks other than CBS – much of the content from Fox, NBC, ABC, etc. is found there along with select content from subsidiary networks and affiliates. Hulu is where the timid broadcasters go to get their feet wet in internet media streaming by sharing costs.

They haven’t yet realized that streaming Content Delivery Network infrastructure across the country is a heck of a lot cheaper in terms of real money than buying and maintaining their old broadcast infrastructure was/is. They also haven’t weeded through all of the non compete clauses etc. in contracts with local affiliates, so I expect them to act slow when they really should leapfrog to their own network by network infrastructure. At some point the light bulb will go on and people will realize that other than creating local news feeds, being a place to buy local ads,  etc. that there’s little other real value add from those local affiliates.

The “to stream or not to stream” question is one that’s easily answered… antique content or even newer content sitting in an archive is collecting dust, content streaming to even 0.01 percent of the populace is collecting some ad revenue. Something for antique content is still better than nothing for antique content. Trying to do this on the cheap via the joint venture of Hulu is a mistake to my mind. Trying to make Hulu “premium” is also a mistake, you can’t compete with the others unless you are ready to get into bidding wars for “exclusive” content with the HBO, Showtime, Netflix, and Blockbuster crowd.

Bottom line: ABC, NBC, and the others need to lose the “B” for broadcasting in their acronym and replace it with an “N” for netcasting if they know what’s good for them.

Hulu site | Wikipedia on Hulu.

Independent Media: These guys are the ones to watch, and this is where the experiments and innovators in new television are coming from. Among them you will find media distributors like Vimeo, Youtube, Bloggingheads, Motionbox, and even Old print magazine sites trying to claw back to relevance in this century, etc. There are channels, and original content at all of the above, but it’s going to take a while for them to reach maturity. In the meantime you still need to surf them on occasion just to stay in touch with the current buzz and memes.

The Premium Streamers

Netflix has quite a rich offering of movies, shows, and DVDs. The newer content streams for the most part, but some movies are “DVD only,” while most of the really old content is available as mailed DVDs.  Watching “The Legend of the Seeker” season 1&2, which just wrapped its finale May 21st was easy through streaming to Microsoft Media center, but watching Stargate Atlantis season 1 & 2 takes a series of mailed DVD’s. The turn around on the mailed DVD’s is prompt as long as you are good about mailing them back. Of the premium streamer/DVD outlets, this is my choice because they seem to be the best value as long as you keep your flow of DVD’s flowing along with the instant streaming items. Either alone is not enough, both together are great. Netflix has a tiered (1,2, or 3 DVD at a time plans)

Wikipedia on Netflix

Blockbuster is the competition, their advantage over Netflix is that if you just have to have a movie now that’s not available by streaming, then you can drive down to the nearest Blockbuster. Like Netflix they have a tiered set up and price plan, which I won’t quote since some of these are in flux due to WII deals market competition at present.

Wikipedia on Blockbuster

The Other Premium Option: Redbox

Redbox keeps DVD kiosks stocked at many grocery stores and fast food chains, and you can pick up a selection of the latest releases for $2.00 per day rental – by leveraging their McDonald’s connection Redbox actually surpasses Blockbuster in locations. That said, this would be my last resort – used only if I had a must see movie right away, which isn’t going to be often. At two bucks minimum per rental, you could easily over run your media budget, and I much prefer the flat rate commodity pricing of Netflix and Blockbuster over that of Redbox.

Educational Media

UC, Yale, MIT, PBS, TED, all provide online educational programming, most also have Youtube channels, but the real points of interest are the online open course ware offerings.  You can audit courses all the way up to master’s for free and you can’t beat that with a stick.

What’s interesting is that private schools stream tons and tons of actually valuable video on the web for free while Public Broadcasting System puts little up on their site, typically snippets and teasers vs their whole series archives complete online.

This follows the course of the current private broadcast companies and premium channel cousins, who don’t stream much from their sites, mostly from HULU. The point to make here once again is that unwatched, archived content that collects dust doesn’t collect revenue, everything online and running some ads collects some revenue. The question to ask is will the private Universities streaming open course ware eventually put in ads to support the infrastructure?

Finally: The internet is for Pr0N!

Or so the saying goes — it’s not a secret that Porn sites receive the most traffic on the internet. Since I am using a computer the ability to use a brower with flash and other video codecs is built in, and that means that Porn sites also work from this setup on the HD tv. Another big plus over the hardwired “use our widget” environments you find built into special set connecting boxes and TV channels.

Summary:

A computer hooked to your TV will not give you full premium channel cable package equivalence, however it will give you a lot of freedom to go beyond that pre-packaged big content box with methods to gain 80-90 percent of the content you get from the packages and tiers at your cable co. I would recommend it to everyone, and have trimmed all my premium channels from my cable package at this point. Sometime in the near future I could see even basic cable becoming unplugged.

Update 7/19 – Blockbuster Delisted on stock exchange.

Invitation to Google Voice

Woohoo! I’ve gotten my invite to Google voice, which means I can try out / beta their new voice service and let you know how it goes. I will apply by asking for a new phone number that will ring or not ring all of my other numbers, depending on how I set it up.

It looks pretty good, with the service essentially being a cloud based network queue and voicemail point for all of my phones that also does voicemail and other services. I’m going to experiment as I go and let you know what things are good, and what could use improvement.

I thought I better start taking the first step towards cutting free entirely from location based telephony, since at some point in the future many of us will have several IPV6 addresses that substitute for phone numbers, and eventually all “phone” calls will convert to video calls anyway.

Why I’m an Optimist: Large Scale Macro Trends

So it is that I am a confident optimist based on the past example of our long history. Whatever pratfalls, missteps, and tumbles that humanity has taken we have always managed to dust off and carry on with the journey after. As we witness one of those pratfalls that will become the biggest environmental disaster since we started recording them in the Gulf of Mexico I am also confident that over time the problem can be overcome

A symbol to me of the power of our future, and our technology. I traveled thousands of miles in mere hours to snap this digital photo and capture it on a chip the size of a postage stamp.

While we move forward in technology at a furious pace there certainly are some huge gaps, and as those gaps and verges close we will see many new things that nobody predicted nor could have predicted; and we will see old things fade away. The largest scale macro trends will continue regardless of gaps and pitfalls; if one path to the future closes a thousand others will open. It’s been that way for most of our history and that’s a large scale macro trend I don’t expect to falter.

In future articles I’m going to outline some gaps I’ve seen, and potential means to close them. Please keep in mind however that nobody can predict the future – that you can only predict trends. Even when predicting trends you are likely to get the future wrong if you look at micro or macro trends — you cannot predict which trends will continue, and which will end, you can only look at the large confluences of trends and attempt guesses at which are most likely to continue. In other words you know that it’s likely that the Mississippi will make it to the Gulf of Mexico regardless of the oxbows and loops it makes.

Think of the sharp trend lines and market charts once there of VHS and Beta Max tape manufacturing and sales to get an idea of what I mean. At the dawn of the tape age, none could predict with certainty the micro trend of the war between the formats, or whether the macro trend of tape sales in general would continue, but it was easy to step back and see the larger scale macro trend of generic technology – data storage media would continue to change, but storage would continue to become less expensive, smaller in form and format, and more widely available.

Whether that tape machine was capturing and streaming back data in your Betamax, VHS, or computer room backup tape carousel it was all same-same when you consider the larger macro function of the technology: Capturing data for preservation and/or later playback. That was global.

The generic larger purpose of tapes and the various tape formats was to record and preserve data. The real trend wasn’t between the formats or the physical shape or the protocols: it was really towards more data in less physical space and for less cost. That large scale macro trend was occurring in all formats, from silicon to tape to hard drives to optical and it continues through this day. It’s also quite possible that some other technology will replace both Blue Ray and HD-DVD before that format battle ever finishes.

A few years back it would have been a massive project in capital and expense to perform a one time physical transfer of 650 gigabytes of data between two companies or vendors – however right now a single person could pop into SAM’s or Best Buy and pick up at 1 Terabyte or 2 Terabyte USB drive and get that transfer done in under two hours if you eliminate the travel time. Even better than that you can see storage devices becoming something a bit more than just storage devices. One example is the “Eye-Fi” chip – it’s specialized storage for Digital cameras, but it’s also a GPS and a Wifi network adapter for your camera. It’s the size of a postage stamp, and the width of a couple of quarters.

There are cards with larger memory space, and you could put an entire K-12 education in the space of one of these postage stamp cards if you worked at it.

So when looking at the longer term future to get to accurate predictions of trends you must take them to higher functional large scale levels, or look at them as very large scale macro trends. Worldwide soybean production going up is not a large scale macro trend. The large scale macro trend behind that simplex market trend is that food supplies and therefor diets are diversifying globally.

This large scale macro trend is the confluence of several technologies crossing verges, and no particular macro trend (in the marketing, woo-woo “we are trying to sell you something” definition of macro trends) is responsible.

Instead all are somewhat needed, including better packaging, preservation, transport, free trade, the internet and television proliferation of diverse cultural methods of cooking,  etc . etc.  Don’t worry however foodies: if any of these smaller macro trends falters, something else will take its place. The large scale macro trend of more diverse diets and food supplies is not going to end anytime soon because large scale macro trends are measured in centuries and millenniums, not years and decades. They are determined only in part by demographics and desires as marketers would tell you, but also by technology.  There might be momentary fluctuations – some that last a decade or two, or even some like the Dark Ages that last centuries, but the large macro trends will continue. Other examples of large scale macro trends:

  • Worldwide capital increases
  • Our sources of energy multiply
  • Our ability to store and transfer knowledge increases
  • Life spans increase

Technology becomes more complex, and more capable, while becoming more accessible as individual powers and capabilities increase. In my garage sits a car with more horsepower than most medieval kings could muster in a few moments, in my computer is a powerful media studio that can broadcast to the world over the internet, on tap at the nearest electrical outlet is more energy than that held by all of the tyrants in history who ever held human slaves.

The particular spots or time where these large scale macro trends fail are the exceptions not the rule. Afghanistan and Sub-Saharan Africa are two places where these overall trends break right now,  but they are the exceptions not the rule, and over time even those places will improve.

So it is that I am a confident optimist based on the past example of our long history. Whatever pratfalls, missteps, and tumbles that humanity has taken we have always managed to dust off and carry on with the journey after. As we witness one of those pratfalls that will become the biggest environmental disaster since we started recording them in the Gulf of Mexico I am also confident that over time the problem can be overcome.

Frankenputer Streaming Media Server: It Lives

I got tired of having fifteen different flavors of media (pictures, movies, songs, home videos, bought videos, etc. etc. etc.) that all required different devices or different cables or some widget or wadget to display, hear, or print.

I got tired of having fifteen different flavors of media (pictures, movies, songs, home videos, bought videos, DVDs, Memory chips with pics, etc. etc. etc.) that all required different devices or different cables or some widget or wadget to display, hear, or print. So I grabbed all of the old computer carcasses out of the basement and piece-patched them together to create a pretty robust server that I can stream everything to and also back up my pics, music, and movies to. Thus starts The Chronicles of Frankenputer.

I’m going to try out Windows media server and also Itunes to see how they compare – along the way I’ll note the “technology gaps” so you can overcome them easier or know what isn’t quite ready yet for those who might be planning doing this themselves. Before you say “what’s the big deal, it’s just a computer hooked to a big screen so you can play DVD’s” keep in mind that this critter is also wireless, a back up server, and running Media center, Itunes, and Photoshop, and it connects to everything wireless in the house. It’s more than just another computer as a DVD player set up…

The media server specs are here:

  • Core II duo CPU
  • 8 4 GB memory*
  • 1.5 TB disk space (I had butt loads of old 250 GB drives around to create that with.)
  • Bluetooth Mouse and Keyboard
  • Wireless N network adapter
  • Nvidia GTX 260 video card
  • DVI-D to HDMI adapter for the flat screen
  • Creative sound card for 5.1 sound
  • Windows 7 64 bit
  • Photoshop Elements 8.0

Here’s a picture of the of it under construction with temp keyboard and speakers. After I’m done configuring it will go under the cabinet and plug into the 5.1 sound. I’m using an old FX-7026 case and MB as base, but the parts are cobbled from other machines — the poor thing is really a Frankenputer full of hand me down parts. It’s networked wth Wireless N, so any widget from security cams to my regular camera can stream to the big screen, which is kind of nice.

With Microsoft Media center I’ve been able to add home movies, Netflix, CBS online, streaming internet radio, all of my picture directories, and all of my video libraries. Streaming Hulu and Netflix comes across much better than I expected, and I’m going to hit the other video channels to bookmark them later tonight (youtube, vimeo, etc. etc. ) along with satellite radio since I have a sub for that in the car.

Of course any other internet site (yes, Pron! too) works fine and later I’ll be adding the Kindle PC reader. It also replaced my DVD/ Blu ray player which allows me to raise the shelves high enough to fit this in the cabinet. Since this thing blows a lot more heat than the DVR I am also going to make a cutout with a small fan in the back of the cabinet. After that I will probably upgrade the DVD R/W drive, the one I have in it now was a loss leader no name that cost $25.00.
Even though it sounds great, there are still gaps in the technologies, and I’ll be going over some of those in the near future. There are also things you can’t get yet over the internet that you can get over cable, so this solution is not for everyone, but later I’ll be looking at methods to tie into the Cable DVR.

*Update: the original 8 GB was dropped to 4 GB after I discovered that Frankenputer has a pair of bad memory slots. (the 2 two gig simms work fine in other PC’s) I also discovered that loading ITUNES still loads the Gear drivers, and these can hose up some older internal DVD drives, forewarned is forearmed. I had to unload ITUNES to make the DVD fully functional, but ITUNES worked fine while it was loaded, and I will attempt a reload now that I have a newer DVD drive. In the meantime Media player works good.

Bill Gates on Energy, Climate and Poverty

Very important talk here, pretty much what I’ve been saying when I’ve taken the time to bash Gore and his anti-nuclear crowd in We.

It’s crucial that we create plentiful cheap energy – it’s also crucial that it be carbon free and safe. Bill thinks he knows a way.